


Abyss

by Lunasong365



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Ark-Bible, Biblical References, CW-Graphic description of Drowning, Drowning, Flood-Bible, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-25
Updated: 2017-03-25
Packaged: 2018-10-10 12:57:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10438227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lunasong365/pseuds/Lunasong365
Summary: Aziraphale shook his head. “God’s fed up with the wickedness of the Earth. He’s got a plan to wipe it all out and start over.”“I didn’t do it,” Crowley said, holding up his hands in surrender. “Whatever it is, whatever has gotten God this mad, I had no part of it. I’m just a very minor demon trying to lead a quiet life.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> The author is grateful to [irisbleufic](http://archiveofourown.org/users/irisbleufic/pseuds/irisbleufic) and [athousandelegies,](http://archiveofourown.org/users/athousandelegies/pseuds/athousandelegies) whose separate conversations with me on this topic helped me verbalize my GO Flood headcanon and led to this fic.  
> athousandelegies was also the beta for this work.

 

__________

 

In the end, Crowley died as well.

 

__________

 

_The earth was covered with a deluge beyond imagination. Puddle into rivulet. Rivulet into stream, stream into river. The rivers had overflowed their banks. The water swirled, forming eddies, waves, presenting a deceptive façade that concealed the true horror of the omnicide hidden beneath. Drop by relentless drop, shower to sheets, the water had fallen from the heavens. From Heaven! He inwardly cringed at the irony, sickened by the reality. Was he truly the only one of angel stock who’d realized how wrong this was? Was he the only demon who understood the implications of what was happening? What exactly would he – Hell’s Agent on Earth – be, if everything on Earth – everything he’d loved about the Earth – was destroyed?_

 

__________

 

An unexpected jangling from his door chimes downstairs roused Crowley from a peaceful late-morning slumber. Grumbling, he materialized a linen tunic and tossed his favorite tasseled shawl over his shoulder before stumbling down the stairs of his comfortable dwelling and through the courtyard to his front door. 

“Aziraphale!” he said with surprise. He hadn’t seen the angel in several years. “What brings you to Mesopotamia?” Although Aziraphale was technically the Enemy, Crowley had always tried to maintain cordial relations, even if he always seemed to show up at the most inopportune times. It was a quite complicated and odd relationship, but one that had already spanned several centuries. It didn’t hurt his own diabolical cause to be aware of the angel’s doings. “May I tempt you to some lunch?” 

Aziraphale didn’t even blink at his little joke. “Thank you. I hope it’s not too much trouble. I’ve got some business in the neighborhood.” 

Observing the code that one honors a guest with hospitality, Crowley laid out some cushions and invited Aziraphale to sit. He brought out a woven reed basket filled with bread and pomegranate, and set out some cups. The demon made some inane small talk, trying to discern in a roundabout and subtle manner the purpose of his counterpart’s visit. 

Aziraphale tilted the clay cup he’d just drunk from. He swirled the sediment in the bottom and looked up. 

“Pity there isn’t anything other than water to drink,” he commented. 

“Whatever do you mean?” Crowley observed. “Water’s good enough for animals. It helps plants to thrive. It certainly satisfies thirst in humans. Unless you’ve got a predilection for goat milk, what else could there be beside water?” 

“Nothing… yet.” Aziraphale continued to moodily contemplate the cup. “Funny how water doesn’t have its own shape, but always assumes the shape of its container.” 

Crowley proceeded cautiously, not sure what direction the angel was going with this conversation. “Perhaps it does. After all, we have our own shapes, but we’ve assumed the shapes of our manifestations. We fill the vessel, but we don’t become the vessel. We each retain our own nature.” He offered a toothy expression, hoping to remind Aziraphale of his own treacherous nature.

“And yet,” the angel set the cup down, “water is so beneficial when it’s controlled. Did you know that humans are starting to divert water with sluices and channels to better nourish their crops? They’re so clever when it comes to adapting Creation to their own purposes.”

Crowley grinned, as one of his favorite pastimes was observing humans coming up with increasingly new and amazing ideas. Then his countenance sobered. 

“I’ve seen water out of control.” The demon pensively looked aside to study the bricks in the wall of his home. Each had been painstakingly formed by hand from mud and clay, fired, and laid with mortar by humans to provide his secure shelter. “Water always finds a way through, no matter what the barrier, if there’s enough of it, or if it’s directed with enough force. Water has the potential to be very destructive. Maybe one day the humans will be able to control flooding with barriers and reserve the water for later, when it’s needed during the dry season. Might even be able to use it for fishing.”

“Mmm,” Aziraphale hummed noncommittally. He stood up, signaling the end of the discussion. “Thanks for the hospitality, Crowley. I’m off to see a man about a boat.”

 _Okay, that too,_ Crowley conceded, irked he hadn’t thought of it first. There was all kinds of latent possibility inherent in recreational boating.

 

__________

_The water was about mid-calf. Of course, he was drenched. There was no escaping the downpour. The wind gusted with a chill that made Crowley’s human body involuntarily shiver. From his now-besieged promontory, he searched the greyed horizon for a sign, for relief, for anything that might reverse the apparently inevitable conclusion to this epic celestial tantrum. He could feel the water working around his feet, the surging current eroding the sand and dirt that comprised his stronghold._

 

__________

 

The demon had returned home from an evening in the city shaking his head. Sure, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff people thought up themselves. Often involving scorpions. A five hundred year lifetime just didn’t seem long enough for them to accomplish all the evil their imaginations contrived. Crowley sometimes felt as useless on Earth as he’d felt out-of-place in Heaven. Or ill-suited in Hell. 

 _Useless._ He worked hard to feign the appearance of accomplishment, sending regular glowing reports of perversion to Hell scratched as cuneiform into clay plates and tossed into the ether. (He’d learned to wait at the window afterwards for a moment, as he’d once gotten a nasty knot on the back of his head via return mail.) In truth, though, he hardly had to lift a finger. He spent a great deal of his time simply basking in the freedom his infernal reputation and terrestrial position offered. The Earth was a beautiful place, and he enjoyed not only the company of many of its human residents, but indulged in many fine examples of their creativity and workmanship. He was nurturing a resplendent tiered garden along one wall in his courtyard. He was fond of small animals, and he spent almost as much time walking the hilly country around the Euphrates as he did in town enjoying music, dance, and good food. 

Aziraphale was sitting on a bench outside his front door. 

Even though his previous contacts with Aziraphale had been relatively benign, an angel showing up unannounced on what apparently was to become a regular basis was never a good thing. Crowley nodded courteously as Aziraphale looked up. The demon was taken aback at the angel’s vacant, bleary expression.

 Aziraphale followed his counterpart through the house and into the courtyard, where Crowley bade him sit while he drew a cup of water from a round amphora near the entrance. 

Aziraphale drained the cup, then shook his head. “Nine generations. That’s all it took.”

Crowley raised an eyebrow and waited. 

“God’s fed up with the wickedness of the Earth. He’s got a plan to wipe it all out and start over.” 

Crowley stood up, a dozen thoughts racing through his head. _Bugger. Have the humans become so effective at evil they're now threatening my job security through self-destruction? Wait. Destroy the Earth? But that means… the people I've grown fond of… and all their creative activities… and the animals… and the plants… and I'll have nowhere to go… except back to Hell… is Aziraphale here to smite me?_

“I didn’t do it,” Crowley said, holding up his hands in surrender. “Whatever it is, whatever has gotten God this mad, I had no part of it. I’m just a very minor demon trying to lead a quiet life.” 

“I know it wasn’t you,” Aziraphale confessed. “In fact, I think a great deal of the reason has to do with angels. Oh, Crowley,” he added, seeing the demon’s expression turn, “it wasn’t me either. But angels have found a way to have relations with the fair daughters of Earth.”

Crowley was a bit more blunt. “You mean your _sexless_ angel brethren have _made the effort_ and spawned little angel-human hybrids.” He’d seen the result of the angels’ licentiousness. In fact, the Nephilim, as they were called, were leaders in society. Their intelligence and beauty had only led to increasingly more inventive means of corruption.

Aziraphale solemnly nodded. “Only a few representatives of each species will be saved. A man named Noah is building a huge boat outside of town. Pretty soon, it’s going to start raining and it’s not going to stop… “ 

“ _Why?_ Why would God do this?” Crowley interrupted, suddenly furious. He jerked his arm through the air in a frenetic gesture. “It’s so… arbitrary! He’s the one who’s allowed all this! He set it in motion! It’s _wrong_ to kill everything based on the shortcomings of His favorite species! Where’s the mercy? WHERE’S THE MERCY, AZIRAPHALE?” He grabbed Aziraphale by his robe at the throat, his demon eyes glowing with unnatural fire. Aziraphale spluttered, his breath strangled by Crowley’s grip. “Yeah, that’s what it’s going to feel like as the air gets choked out of every living thing…” He violently shoved the angel against a wall where his head cracked loudly. Aziraphale slid down the wall to a crumpled heap on the floor.

He wiped the bloody spit from the corner of his mouth with the heel of his hand, then looked up at Crowley with a resigned expression. “ _Who_ set it in motion?” he asked quietly. 

“Get. Out.” The demon’s cold anger was fearsome. Aziraphale scrambled to his feet.

“I know you were just doing your job. Giving humans free will; a choice. Unlike us, they can choose whether to be good or bad. Their poor decisions have finally caught up with them.” 

Crowley threw his cup at him. He missed, the pottery shattering against the doorpost. “I’ve also heard the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. People just doing their best with the lot they’ve been given in life. Don’t you dare,“ he hissed, “pin the deaths and damnation of everyone and everything on me.” 

Aziraphale turned, and Crowley detected what may have been remorse in his eyes. The demon was beyond caring.

“I know you’re not the one who makes decisions of life and death. If you’d like, I’ll find a place for you on the boat.” 

“I’d rather burn in Hell.” Crowley slammed the door in Aziraphale’s face.

 

__________

 

 _It would have been difficult not to have had second thoughts about his decision. He’d considered it, for sure. He'd known where the boat was, knew that by changing form he could easily find some crevice in which to ride out the storm. Aziraphale was safely ensconced on the boat. He would not have been able to hide his presence from the angel. Aziraphale would have sought him out, tried to justify with more half-assed credos the ineffability of the way things were, perhaps even gloated about the demon having sought shelter in a haven sanctioned by God. Intentionally returning to Hell seemed a viable alternative to gamely accepting the circumstances thrust upon him as a pawn in some zero-sum game._

_The water, insistent, slate-grey, and clogged with flotsam, was lapping around his waist._

__________

 

Crowley had found himself in the awkward position of trying to encourage people to improve their moral behavior. He still nurtured a small hope that the situation was reversible. Maybe if people weren’t _totally_ wicked, but just a _little_ wicked, he could maintain his comfortable position.

It wasn’t working. They laughed at him, called him a goody two-sandals, and blatantly stepped up their vile and corrupt ways. They scoffed at the threat of divine retribution. They made him the butt of satirical comedy routines about little chickens when he tried to explain it was going to rain and they were all going to die. “Crowley!” they jeered. “This is a desert! It only rains during the rainy season!” 

Crowley had seriously thought about investing in tarps. But what good is it to have a purse full of money and nowhere to spend it? After yet another futile day in town, he was walking through the hill country he loved so much. The native plants here thrived in the seemingly harsh conditions. Yellow chamomile and bellflower were relatively abundant, and various types of grasses each produced its own color of tiny bloom. Here and there a red yucca strove toward the sky, and gum trees provided sporadic shade. Crowley startled a young gazelle, which bounded away, joining up with its herd to gracefully retreat across the lower valley. Butterflies delicately floated above the flora, and the demon saw a lizard capture a locust for dinner with its sticky tongue. He sat down on a rocky outcrop and held his hand over his eyes to cut down the glare. In the distance, he could barely see the boat, what he still hoped was folly. As the demon watched, the large door in the side was winched shut with a barely audible bang. 

He turned and looked toward the north. Clouds were amassing, threatening, malevolent, like bruises on innocent skin, boiling and building to towering heights, preceded across the silken sky by the wispy sentinels that indicate a change in weather. Although he could not yet hear thunder, intermittent flashes between and behind the clouds colored them an abominable pink and blue. The skin at the back of Crowley’s neck prickled.

A cool breeze, relief for the stifling afternoon, swirled up the hillside, causing the grass to ripple in waves. Sparrows took flight, nervously chirping as they wheeled and dipped. Crowley scanned the horizon for the nearest high apex and started to run.

 

__________

 

 _Crowley pushed off the rock and was quickly carried away by a rip current that seemed to take a long time to disperse its velocity. He was no longer quite sure where he was; all landmarks were covered, the horizon seemed to meld into the endless water with no distinction between the void and the sky. A featureless blanket of clouds erased all celestial attributes, conceding only a dull light that indicated not everything had been destroyed. The demon turned to float on his back, remembering a story that now almost seemed like a myth: a time when God had created a formless earth and separated the waters from the sky, then dry land from waters. Now everything seemed to be in retrograde._

_Choppy waves periodically washed over his face, getting into his nose and throat. He could taste the despair; an instinctive understanding beyond empathy for the millions of discarded lives: people, animals, birds, creeping things, flowers, trees, even fish – for they could not breathe what had become a toxic solution, formulated from a godforsaken poison._

_His anger at the angel and his God (the_ angel’s _God, he was careful to clarify) had been_ _thermoformed into a brittle caustic shell over the hollowness left behind from the absence of everything. That anger may have been the only thing now keeping him afloat. He burned for a chance to fully manifest his hatred, his horror, his utter repulsion at the supreme Heavenly being and his simpering representative on Earth._

 _He found he no longer had the will. He was exhausted to his core._

_Crowley was immortal, but his human body was not. He slipped below, feebly kicking, uselessly flailing his arms. He could feel himself sinking, and he brushed against unnamed grotesqueries in the turbulence. He held his breath as long as he could. His heart was beating rapidly in a reflexive panic. The urgency for air became something beyond his immortal control._

_He exhaled and gasped, each cilia of his lungs now overwhelmed in liquid, his brain starving of oxygen. His heart went into arrhythmia in a last final struggle before ceasing the constant beat with which he’d become so familiar. Crowley had one last brief sensation of drifting descent before he was discorporated and instantaneously sucked into Hell._

 

__________

 

Crowley awoke in unfamiliar surroundings, clutching a coarse woolen blanket. Rolling over, his eyes slowly focused on a figure sprawled across a table on the far side of the room.

He wrapped the blanket around himself and cautiously tiptoed behind the unconscious being. “Aziraphale?” The demon reached down to tap him on the shoulder. When that didn’t work, he shook the angel vigorously. When Aziraphale reacted by raising his head, Crowley cuffed him sharply across the back of his skull. It served to dissipate some of the anger that had been festering since their last meeting.

“Ow,“ Aziraphale groaned. He appeared to be trying to pull himself into a sitting position, but something seemed off with his coordination. He covered his face with his hands, then peered out at Crowley through the cracks between his fingers. His bloodshot eyes opened wide.

“Crowley?”

The demon nodded, his face a blank mask, devoid of any telling emotion.

“Crowley.” The angel spoke his name like a confession, an affirmation of faith. It was rather odd. Aziraphale righted the cup that had fallen over and vaguely gestured toward a shelf on the wall.  “Get tha’ other cup. Dere.”

Crowley collected the cup and brought it to the table. “What’s wrong with you, Aziraphale? I’ve never seen you like this.”

“’M drunk.”

Crowley had never before heard the past participle of a verb used to indicate a state of being. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Here.” Aziraphale poured from the decanter on the table. “It’s new – since the Flood. Ever’thing’s new. But nothing has changed. The humans – dere still at it. Inventin’ stuff. They built a tower ‘n’ God got mad again. He thinks they don’ need Him. ‘N’ mebbe dey don’t. I don’ know what else c’n happen – ‘cept my job just keeps gettin’ more difficult. Learnin’ irregular verb conjugations is the least of it.” He ended this pronouncement with some mumbled tenses and colorful-sounding epithets in a language Crowley didn’t know. “So. Where you been?”

Crowley, who’d been sipping the wine with an admitted bit of pleasure, grimaced. “I went to Hell. I tried to hide; make myself insignificant. But they found me. Gave me a commendation and a parade, they did, for doubling the hitherto intake of damned souls into Hell. I just wish…” He closed his eyes pensively and sighed, still discomfited by the thought of his undeserved celebrity. “When it was confirmed there were survivors, I jumped at the chance to return to Earth. It’s a h…” he offered a rueful smile, “… a lot better than the alternative. I wanted… “ Crowley faltered, flustered by a sudden realization he didn’t care to reveal. “How about you? How were your accommodations on the boat?”

“Horrible,“ Aziraphale shuddered. “Dark. Filthy. Odoriferous. Crowded. Seasick. So many different kinds of animals, all caged without air and sunlight, yet resigned to their fate – somehow understanding they were the last of their kind and they _had_ to get along. It was incredibly sad in one way but fostered a strange kind of peace in another. Every creature on board had a partner, a companion of a like kind to help them endure it. Even the humans were paired up. I had never felt so alone. And near the end they had to ration the food... “

Crowley began, “But you don’t have to eat…” He looked at the cup in his hand and thought better about finishing his sentence.

Instead, he got up and looked out the window. A faultless cerulean dome; temperate breezes swaying the fronds of a date palm in the garden across the street. The chirp of sparrows in the dirt. The drone of a wasp building a nest under the eaves. The chatter and laughter of humans going about their daily business.

Crowley turned to catch Aziraphale staring at him. “You like them, don’t you? People? Funny, I never pegged you as a sentimentalist,” said the angel.

The demon snorted. “Don’t let it get around, will you? I’d hate to have to go through this again. I might actually have to use my demonic powers to thwart your side next time.”

At that, Aziraphale smiled. “I may have scant influence in that department, but I do hope that, based on the results, there won’t be a next time. However, it might be a good idea for you to lay low for a while. Get out of Babylon. I could,” he cleared his throat, “be induced to arrange safe transit.”

Crowley sat down across from his counterpart, chin on fist, drumming his fingers on the table. A pause ensued as he mulled over the offer. He surreptitiously studied the angel’s face through lowered eyelashes. _Why would an angel provide any advantage to a demon? Friends close, and enemies closer?_

Aziraphale’s eyes were now clear and bright. “I’ll even come with you if you like. Just to make sure you get to your destination safely.”

Crowley blinked in surprise, but nodded acquiescence. “Will you also bring the wine?”

Aziraphale held up his cup in salute.

Crowley took a deep draught from his own cup, wiped his mouth, and returned the toast.

“Aziraphale, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

 

__________

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Biblical references: Genesis: 1-11. A brief homage to _Casablanca._ The rest claims no historical accuracy.


End file.
